Monthly Archive: September 1955

The Times and The Guardian both report the views of Mr Justice Wallington who complained about omissions from a legal document. His Lordship said yesterday that, “people were more concerned with getting to their television sets than with doing their work correctly.” He went on, “In the case of females, they are more concerned with powdering their noses so that they may leave at 5 o’clock precisely that they are in putting such matters right.” (more…)

In the briefest of News in Brief snippets, The Times reveals that “The Rev. L. M. Charles-Edwards, vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, has been appointed religious adviser to Associated-Rediffusion Ltd”. That is the only television-related news in The Times today. (more…)

The Times’ TV reviewer (TR) was pleased to sit down, last night, “to a substantial classic” in the form of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country”, which was produced by Associated-Rediffusion under their International Theatre banner. TR found not the usual “sense of enclosed and occasionally cramped intimacy” often found in television drama, but instead “a large cinematic spaciousness”. Robert Hamer’s direction was “accomplished” and so were a number of the performances. In particular, “in Miss Margaret Leighton’s hands Natalya… had not only a tense nervous strength but a most moving vulnerability”; “Mr Laurence Harvey was a sincere, likeable Beliayev; and in their different ways Mr Michael Gough’s Rakitin and Miss Zena Walker’s Vera subtly confided in the invisible audience.” (more…)

The Daily Express’s Cyril Aynsley was disappointed by Associated Broadcasting’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Not so much, it seems, by the programme itself as by the failure of the programme to live up to its “top-pressure publicity as a dazzling celebrity show.” The main variety acts were approved of: “Top artists were Gracie Fields, who gave a monologue and sang three songs, and Guy Mitchell, the American singer. Other acts were of a high standard.”

But, he writes, “This was good enough variety, but not good enough to match the build-up,” and “The intrusion of ‘Beat the Clock’ and the amount of time devoted to it knocked the programme off balance.” (more…)

Writing in The Observer, Maurice Richardson has much to say about the new kid on the block as well as its more established rival. Noting a tendency for ITV “to imitate BBC patterns and actual features” he describes Twopenny Corner (sic) as “being du cote de chez Grove”. On the other hand “Dragnet… promises well”, Take Your Pick is “riotously low-brow”, the new variety “is perhaps a bit slicker than BBC”. While “ITA’s (sic) weather report is definitely livelier and sexier” its “most successful single feature yet is Orson Welles compèring his own travelogues.” (more…)

A wealthy widow is murdered and the likely suspect appears to be one of the members of the French fencing team in London for an international tournament. But which one?

Synopsis

Colonel March is visited at The Department of Queer Complaints by Martha Pollard, a widow who is dressed, darkly, as though in mourning and in a sense she is, but not for her husband, who died some years ago. She had fallen in love with Pierre, a self-proclaimed artist who she met on the beach in France and they were together for, as she says, “four weeks and three days.” He then left her, taking some of her jewellery with him. Some time later, she sees him again, at Paris airport where he’s flying to England to take part in an Anglo-French fencing competition and she follows him to London – but it’s him she wants back, not the jewels.

It’s at this point that she sees March, though it’s unclear if she has chosen to visit him, or whether the fact that she was carrying a gun has interested March in her. In any case, she says, “If he had refused to come back to me, I might have killed myself.”

March is worried that Mrs Pollard is behaving like “a young girl in the throes of her first love affair” and is concerned by her behaviour. He asks, “Suppose I could prove to you that he’s preyed on other women in much the same manner?” She finds the idea hard to believe, but is not averse to him trying and so March enlists the help of Inspector Ames of Scotland Yard and Monsieur Goron of the French Surêté.

March and Ames visit the fencers at the salle d’armes and await the arrival of Mrs Pollard so that she can identify the man in question. While they wait Hartnett invites March, who used to be a fencing champion, to referee one of the matches – an invitation he gladly accepts. Ames, who has gone out to find Mrs Pollard, returns with the news that she appears to have committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. With her was found a collection of press cuttings relating to the fencer René Trenier. Trenier, by profession, is a commercial artist but rather than question him, March and Ames leave.

By following morning, Goron is in England and Ames visits him in his hotel. While Goron consumes his breakfast, Ames explains to him that the autopsy on Mrs Pollard has now been completed and it’s clear that she was murdered, although Ames does not explain the results in detail. He is keen to get Goron actively working on the investigation, but Goron prefers to finish his meal. Goron explains that the result of the autopsy is no surprise: a woman who commits suicide over an affair of the heart will always dress herself in her most attractive negligée, make herself up most beautifully and write a tragic note to the man who jilted her. “That romantic type woman,” he says, “always wants her young man to spend the rest of his life feeling repentant. Which of course he never is.” Goron has also deduced, correctly, that Mrs Pollard was probably suffocated as there were no marks on her body. Ames is deflated.

Ames and Goron interview the fencers one by one and gain little information. Trenier admits that he had met Mrs Pollard once or twice but always when he was with someone else – who he refuses to name. His alibi for the time of the murder is that he spent the evening with Robert Delius. So their last interviewee is Delius himself who confirms that he and Trenier had dinner together, but adds that Trenier left for an appointment at around 7.15. Ames reports to March and tells him that he wanted to arrest Trenier but Goron was against it. March is sanguine: if they get it wrong, Goron will never let them hear the last of it.

Trenier and Delius are talking in the changing room at the salle d’armes, they will be opponents in the deciding bout. Trenier is concerned that the police keep questioning him and pointedly remarks to Delius that he hasn’t told them who Mrs Pollard’s lover was… yet.

March is refereeing and starts the contest. Trenier gets the first score and as they turn away from each other to begin again, Delius secretly removes the safety-tip from his foil. Neither March nor Trenier notice this until the fencing has resumed. March interrupts the combatants and makes Trenier the winner, because of a foul. He arrests Delius for the attempted murder of Trenier and the murder of Mrs Pollard.

Comments

Generally listed as episode 10 or thereabouts, this was an odd episode for Associated Broadcasting to select as an introduction to the series. True, we do get to meet Ames and semi-regular Goron in “Passage at Arms” but it seems peculiar to select an episode where the bulk of the detective work is undertaken by someone other than March himself.

Boris Karloff plays March with a delightfully light touch and the opening few minutes, consisting of the conversation between Martha Pollard and March, is most entertaining despite there being no action to speak of. It will be interesting to see whether March appearing fore and aft with Ames, amidships, doing the donkey work is the normal pattern of these things.

What’s a natural break? That question vexed Daily Express writer Cyril Aynsley who notes that last night “interruptions were made in the middle of four programmes”.

Most of the examples he cites sound like cock-up rather than conspiracy, but here they are: “In Sportsclub… commentator Ken Johnstone said: ”Now let’s go into the gym and see how soccer player Danny Blanchflower is getting on”. Before Johnstone reached the gym an advertisement for soap powder appeared on screen.” (more…)

Perhaps surprisingly, last night’s opening broadcast from commercial television hardly makes front page news in those papers that carry news on their front page. It’s mentioned in passing on the Daily Express’s rather busy page one in a piece headlined “Who killed Grace Archer?” but its main headlines concern the new leader of the Argentine, General Eduardo Lonardi. a miniature tornado in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, and a white paper on the missing diplomats Maclean and Burgess – which is due to be published later today. (more…)

The Times carries a preview of what we’re to expect tonight on commercial television, but there’s nothing in there that we haven’t been told already or which we couldn’t learn from TV Times. Interestingly, the paper also carries some news of a programme that Granada Television will be making – and news about that company has been quite thin on the ground. (more…)